Career Archive

In Mastery, Robert Greene paints a thorough picture of apprenticeship and the power it has had to shape great creative careers throughout history. In one form or another, apprenticeship has been part of the path for masters from Leonardo da Vinci to Benjamin Franklin. Apprenticeship […]

There are plenty of good reasons to stay late at the office, even if you’re not a workaholic. For me as a young employee, making the time to commit some later nights has given me access to large slots of […]

Salesforce. Marketing automation. Certified public accountancy. Javascript. There are lots of skills these days that can look great on a job application. But there’s one skill that (while it won’t look good on a resume) will help you breeze through […]

I cut my teeth as a young employee in part by working in a hardware store back in the summer of 2014. Hardware stores are magical places, and they’re perfect places to be if you want to learn about home maintenance […]

In my book, Ned Stark is the foremost fantasy authority on leadership. Ned demonstrates great leadership more in his actions than in his words, but he says some things which get to the root of leadership: “Bran thought about it. […]

There is an old idea in the Judeo-Christian tradition that humans were given dominion over the earth to rule in the image of God. It’s a remarkable idea, made more remarkable by the fact that such dominion appears to be shared […]

This week several of my company’s European (Dutch and Slovakian) employees came to our US office in Alpharetta, Georgia for a few days. I and a couple of my fellow Americans took it upon ourselves to make sure that they really lived […]

Want your company culture to be stronger? Want people to value each other and work together? Set some s*%^ on fire. OK, I kid. I wouldn’t exactly advise actively creating a crisis. But I would advise (to paraphrase Rahm Emanuel) […]

At the time of his passing, Chik-fil-A founder Truett Cathy had an office desk drawer full of plastic silverware saved up over the years. Like many people of his generation, he inherited frugality from the experience of the Great Depression. […]

The Franciscan friar Richard Rohr talks about the two parts of life: the first half in which we learn and conquer and grasp, and the second in which we learn to give and let go. Similarly, in my experience, there are two […]

I don’t have much in common with the person who cuts my hair. We have obvious differences in age, experience, background, and work (I’m a technology marketer and she is a hair stylist). But as with all humans who look […]

The best jobs teach you things you didn’t expect to learn. Through being a marketer at a bitcoin payment processor, I’ve learned about much more than just marketing. Most of these are the reasons I’m so grateful for the opportunity I’ve had: […]

I’ve been to a decent number of conferences and professional events now for someone my age, but it’s been a while. This last weekend’s experience at FEECon shook me up, gave me pages of notes and a crowded page of items, and […]

Meetings are a necessary evil, and they are worth doing as quickly and efficiently as possible. So there are some serious benefits to batching meetings. We do this at my current company, and while meeting day can be hell, it saves […]

You can see where things are going. Software is making things easier, faster, and more comfortable. That’s no original insight. You might think 20 years from now the skills that make “faster + easier + more comfortable” possible (e.g. software engineering) […]

Being questioned is hard. When other departments or employees in a company start to question our marketing teams, a natural response is to curl up into defensiveness mode. We assume that other teams just don’t understand us or our brilliant plans, […]

It’s natural for young professionals to fear being fired. When we first start out, it seems like the end of the world – a black mark that will follow us forever. That’s probably an overblown fear. Plenty of people get fired and […]

It’s easy to assume is that your credibility you’ve built in your work so far will continue to have purchasing power as your company scales. This is wrong. As frustrating as it is, professional reputation doesn’t transfer easily across work contexts and […]

Nights and mornings are times for me to both reset from long work days and prepare for long work days to come. As I grow further into my work, my evening recharge times have become precious. If you’re going for it during the […]

There’s an old saying that assuming “makes an ass out of you and me”. But assumptions in a business can make an ass out of a whole company if not examined carefully. This is why smart companies question the way they […]

If your company gets a negative review, or a journalist pans your company, or a customer stops using your business, it’s going to hurt. In a small company, people notice these things even more. It’s no small matter for a […]

When I was getting certified for CPR*, I learned that a big no-no is just calling out to the general area around you for help. If you expect to get help, you have to look and be specific (and maybe […]

Miscommunication is about as common as dirt in startup companies. Just as its the main source of conflict and plot in comedy, misunderstanding from miscommunication is one of the main sources of conflict between coworkers. If you want to keep the comedies […]

Startups and big companies probably experience emergencies at about the same rate. The difference is in how those emergencies feel. Big companies have complex structures to reduce risk and absorb the impact of catastrophes. They have policies and escalation paths […]

Scaling a startup involves a lot of hiring. If you’re doing it right, you’re hiring intelligent, experienced, independent, and strong-willed people. If you are doing it right, many of your current people (including you) will be giving up control to those […]

“You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink.” I’ll grant that this folk saying has some wisdom, but it doesn’t quite match my experience. In my experience, you *can* make a horse drink. You just […]

No normal kid has ever wanted to be a marketer. I certainly didn’t. I grew up reading legends and stories of monarchs, knights, adventurers, and wizards. If you’re anything like me and many kids, these were *our* ideal roles. It’s why many of […]

I’ve written before about how important it is to hold your metaphors loosely. This is especially important when you go into work. The metaphors you use to define your work and your workplace relationships will end up defining how see work and work […]

Growing a business successfully is a lot like raising a child. It’s also a little like raising a *ton* of children. If you’ve ever felt ownership and kinship to your work, you know what I mean. The product you built […]